Hello Everyone,

In the past few weeks I’ve seen a huge influx of fake emails and webpages often leading to people having their information stolen. These sites are simply to harvest information and exploit it. And, possibly even sell this information to a 3rd party.

So here’s a quick how-to in detecting harmful emails. Please note this isn’t a fool proof method, but it’s often the way I’ve seen these emails come through.

So let’s take a quick look at what I got today in my inbox:

A screen capture of a fake Chase email.

Looks pretty generic right? Wrong.

Most, if not all but ONE of the links in this email are generic. Most people do not think to check such a thing, especially with how vague the message is. Most emails will try and say “we lost your information and need you to update it” or “there was an error in your account” or something to that matter. It’s easy to miss this if you actually have an account with the company.

So all you need to do to check is the following. Again, this is a common method, but probably not foolproof.

Step 1: Right-click the link that suggests to "go here" to do whatever it is asking.

Step 2: Paste the link into a text box somewhere. The browser URL box is a fast way to do this, but DON'T press enter! A safer way would be to use a text editor program.

As you can see the address has a bit of an anomaly in it. The “www.hisand.cn” should in fact be “www.chase.com” but it is not, therefore making it a fake online form you would have filled out and given all your information to.

It’s a simple two-step process that takes only minutes if not seconds. Remember, it wouldn’t hurt to do this with any type of “official” email you get from whichever company.

Also, it should be known that you can do the same thing within web sites as well. However, it’s much more difficult to see if your actually being “phished” depending on the web page. Myspace plus many other websites have had problems with phishing as well, and has taken measures to let you know when your leaving the site. You know those annoying “Your now leaving this site” pages? Well, those serve a very needed purpose. Many browsers also have phishing detection built in.

I hope this helps some people avoid these problems in the future!

Disclaimer: Nathan Allen Pinard is a professional composer, not an IT expert. Please remember that this is not a fool-proof way to detect fraudulent emails, but will work on most.